Credit where it’s due. Rupert Murdoch’s New York Post headlines this story, “‘War criminal’ gets a UN job’. It’s way to bash the UN but also reveals how Colombo feels completely protected within the international system. China protects her. Just like the US protects Israel. While civilians are being murdered: A suspected war criminal who…
Showing all posts tagged China
No wonder Israel and China loves authoritarian Sri Lanka so much
This is the first interview that Tamil journalist J.S. Tissainayagam of the local Sunday Times newspaper has given since his release in May 2010. It is about the state of the media in Sri Lanka. Tissainayagam received the Peter Mackler Award for journalistic courage and integrity in October 2009.
Chinese are far more resourceful online than most in the West
The Columbia Journalism Review explains that China isn’t simply an authoritarian state where freedoms are suppressed: The resourceful ways that Chinese netizens have responded to the social injustices that surround them and to the limitations of their country’s carefully censored press, and indeed the sheer pace of change in this world, highlight one of the…
Online dissent is being crushed (and we don’t feel fine)
My 2008 book, The Blogging Revolution, documented the rise of web censorship across the world and those fighting against it. Tragically, the problem is only getting worse in Asia and rest assured many Western web multinationals are involved: Governments across south-east Asia are following China‘s authoritarian censorship of the digital world to keep political dissent…
Hungry for a kinder regime
My following book review appeared in Saturday’s Sydney Morning Herald: THREE FAMINES Tom Keneally Knopf, 324pp, $49.95 History is littered with catastrophic examples of government-induced disasters. A new book by the University of Hong Kong’s Frank Dikotter, Mao’s Great Famine, claims that 45 million people were killed between 1958 and 1962. Mao achieved this by…
Censoring millions of Chinese posts daily
A revealing insight into the world of Chinese internet censorship. Massive and growing: According to the report at tech.163 on 13 of October 2010, the head of Baidu Tieba, an automatically generated forum through keyword search, Shu Xun said that the forum on average deleted 1 million posts every day. The report said: “During a…
Meeting Alan Dershowitz in Sydney
Harvard Law Professor Alan Dershowitz is currently in Sydney for the Festival of Dangerous Ideas and last night debated, in front of 2000 people at the Sydney Opera House, lawyer Geoffrey Robertson on The Sins of the Father; Should the Pope be Held to Account? over the massive number of child sex abuse cases. Robertson…
Disaster capitalism envelops us all
My following article appears in the Sydney Morning Herald today: Last year’s cessation of hostilities between the Sri Lankan government and the Tamil Tigers, after up to 40,000 Tamil civilians were murdered in the last months of the conflict, has heralded a Beijing-led invasion of the island. The authoritarian Rajapaksa regime was assisted by Chinese…
There’s no truly safe way to surf the web in the Islamic Republic
For anybody who writes about web censorship and finding ways around it, the lesson in this story is that skepticism towards new-found tools is vital. We’ve all been guilty of celebrating prematurely a piece of software that may help a dissident in Iran or China. Beware: A piece of software called Haystack, which claimed to…
Chinese man online; I’m a slave please help me
How the internet is slowly but significantly changing the face of China, bringing to the public the massive social issues caused by Beijing’s oppressive policies: The photo was taken on September 3 in Beijing. In the photo, Professor Yang Zhizhu from China Youth University for Political Sciences is holding a placard to… sell himself as a…